Sunday, March 20, 2011

Fine Arts - A Walking Tour of Downtown Los Angeles

Wife Minche with Claremont tour group Bradbury House.
Walking Tour of Downtown Los Angeles by Claremont Foundation. Bob Herman, a retired Pomona College professor, led a group of about a dozen of us on a train ride on Metrolink down to Union Station on Saturday March 19. We visited the square in front of Olvera Street and then went up and went through the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The exterior edifice lacks elegance in my view but its contemporary art boxiness makes a strikingly beautiful interior possible, which makes a nice trade. We did admire the statue above the entrance of Our Lady, which is simple, elegant, and quite beautiful. The interior of the cathedral is beautiful to behold, quite original, and I simply loved the tapesties on the wall. The had an exceptional refinement and were made possible using modern computer-driven tapestry techniques in Belgium. The people portrayed in the tapesties were "everyman" and "everywomen" selected from across the Southern California multicultural landscape.

The pictures are from the inside lobby of the Bradbury House on South Broadway. The building was constructed in 1893 and has been completely renovated. The lobby is simply beautiful to behold and to stand in. Very interesting and it has a fascinating story.

We had lunch in the Grand Central Market, virtually all Hispanic. We had delicious Persian food made by a very talented Hispanic family!

Other stops on the tour were the Biltmore Hotel, the Los Angeles Central Library, and the lobby of the Fine Arts Building, another artistic masterpiece of architecture. Then we took the subway back to Union Station and the Metrolink back to Claremont. We are going to do this trip some more. There is a lot to downtown Los Angeles.
Lobby Bradbury House 1893 Downtown LA

Friday, March 4, 2011

Fine Arts - Rembrandt Club Arts Lecture


Seaver House - Pomona College

On Thursday March 3, 2011, members of Scripps College Fine Arts Foundation were guests of the Rembrandt Club at beautiful Seaver House at Pomona College for tea and refreshments. The tea followed an informative lecture on a new exhibition just opening at Getty Villa in Malibu entitled "In Search of Biblical Lands: from Jerusalem to Jordan in Nineteenth Century Photography." The lecture was given by Pomona Art History Professor Kathleen Howe who was the guest curator of the exhibit for the Getty. Professor Howe had a fascinating collection of photographs and discussed the irony between intense worldwide interest in the Holy Land in the nineteenth century with the stony, arid landscape of Palestine and the primitive and impoverished city of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the photographs of the time stirred intense interest and tourists from around the world flooded into the Holy Land in one of the first occurrences of mass tourism.

More information is at the Getty Villa website.
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/biblical_lands/index.html